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Growing up, Michael Molinet — founder of Branch Metrics, Inc. — never thought he wanted to start his own company, much less launch a whole string of successful businesses.
Take his latest enterprise as an example: After raising $600 million for Branch, Molinet led the company to hundreds of millions of dollars per year in revenue. The company has now been valued at $4 billion.
“Honestly, I’d never thought about entrepreneurship or starting a business as a kid,” he says. “It was just not something my family really considered. I imagined getting a job at a secure company, working there for decades, retiring at 65 with a pension or a nice 401k, and then enjoying retirement. When I was in college, I never expected to form a startup.”
To understand Molinet’s success, it’s necessary to begin with the values his parents instilled in him from the beginning.
The son of immigrants
“I’m incredibly blessed to be the son of Cuban immigrants,” Molinet says. “My parents made a ton of sacrifices over the years. Even though it was tough on them, they knew they were giving me and my brothers a better life. I’m incredibly grateful.”
Molinet credits this experience with forging his character. “When you come from humble beginnings, and your family comes from having literally nothing to being able to build up a life, it gives you a really good perspective,” he explains. “It teaches you perseverance, humility, patience, and the importance of taking the long-term view. My parents taught me the value of hard work; they gave me a major, major work ethic. My parents are the hardest working people I know, and their example is what sparked me to become a businessperson in my own right later in life.”
Both of Molinet’s parents fled Cuba for the U.S. as children around 1960. His mother escaped on a boat to Spain, where her family spent only a few months before participating in a refugee program that took them to New York. His father was able to take a boat from Havana to Miami, where he grew up.
As adults, the two met in New York, got married, and eventually started a family after having Molinet and his brothers. While raising their family, they kept their eyes on the future. “As immigrants, they had to take a bet on the future generations,” Molinet says. “They knew the family would have to build up. Each generation would do a little bit better and pass something on to the next. If every generation improved, then after a few, the family would be in really good shape.”
Research demonstrates that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for starting businesses in the U.S., as well as for patenting inventions. As an article in Forbes explains, “Twenty percent of business owners in the U.S. are first-generation immigrants. When you consider that this same demographic only makes up 13% of the total population, you realize that there is something very significant to this number.”
Having grown up in a household of immigrants, it should come as no surprise that Molinet ended up taking this path. At the time, however, he had thought he just wanted to do something with a friend.
Becoming a tech entrepreneur
Like many other entrepreneurs in tech before him, Molinet’s own path began through the most unlikely of conversations. “After graduating from undergrad in 2007, on my first day of work as an engineer, I met this guy named Tyler late one evening around 3 a.m.,” he recounts. “We spent about a weekend hanging out and became close friends. At one point, Tyler looked at me and said, ‘Do you ever think about starting a business?’ I said that I hadn’t, and he replied, ‘Oh, well, I really want to do something.’ So, I told him that I’d like to explore some of his ideas.”
They did more than just explore ideas. For nearly five years, Molinet worked as an engineer during the day and developed side businesses at night and on the weekends. The two ended up investing in real estate together, going into property management, and developing a food vending business.
“That’s when I really realized how much energy and excitement entrepreneurship brought to me,” Molinet says. “However, I also was spending a lot of time reading tech news from TechCrunch and a bunch of other news outlets about software companies and tech companies. I’d do all sorts of research on the founders and the companies. One day, I realized I might be interested in doing that and wanted to get involved in software.”
Molinet figured the best place to get started would be Silicon Valley, but he didn’t know anybody there. “I was living in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the time,” he says. “I didn’t know a single person in tech.”
Figuring that it was the right time in his life to pursue an MBA, Molinet researched the programs available in Silicon Valley. “Lo and behold, Stanford pops up,” he says. “Stanford was the number one MBA program at that time — it’s still usually ranked in the top three MBA programs to this day — and while I was excited about my future, I thought I had no shot.”
Nevertheless, Molinet signed up for the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), which he took five weeks later. After obtaining his scores, he filled out his application for Stanford’s MBA program, got an interview, and was accepted. So, he quit his job and moved to California where he met the other co-founders of his current company, Branch Metrics, Inc.
Overcoming obstacles
Another key to Molinet’s success has been his growth mindset. “A lot of my biggest life moments or changes and inflection points came from failures,” he says. “A lot of people look at successful businesses, and they wonder, ‘How did you do that? How does it feel?’ But they usually don’t look at or know about all the failures that came before.”
Conversely, Molinet credits his failures for making him who he is today. “I’ve come to view failures and challenging times as lessons and learning. That’s all it is. It’s just training; everything in life is training. Don’t ascribe a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ label to it. Instead, just view it as training. I just say, ‘Okay, I made a mistake, but what can I learn from it? What did I learn through the experience?’ I gained skill sets, knowledge, and real-world experience that I can apply to the next thing I do. So, that’s why I don’t think failures are a bad thing. They teach you lessons for the next round.”
Having achieved the highest levels of success, Molinet has dedicated himself to sharing his expertise and insights with others. “I find myself teaching the same things over and over privately,” he says. “Now, I’d like to give some of those learnings to the world.”
